56 I ß Revolution, the Party thought about the damage done in all those political movements, and devised the slogan "The Emancipation of the Mind." So good has come from bad. In recent years, many new writings have ap- peared, some of which surpass the works that were produced in the pe- riod from the nineteen-twenties to the nineteen-fifties. Weare confident of an upsurge now. We believe that our literature can begin to meet interna- tional standards. A FEW days later, the Writers' Association gave me a smal1 banquet. Present were three of the writers I had met-Liang Bin, Yuan ling, and Zhou Jilang-and two of- ficers of the Association, one of whom appeared to be what the Chinese cal1 "a leader;" that is to say, the organi- zation's senior Party supervisor. The banquet took place in a side alcove of a large, modern entertainment hal1 called the Friendship Club. It was on the grounds of the old Tientsin Coun- try Club, and was obviously a gather- ing place of relatively privileged peo- ple. The food was good, the toasts were frequent. During the evening, I learned from my hosts how Chinese writers make their living. They are paid a salary by the government. Their income is \\O oUo\ DODD 9 (( Bonbon?" . . guaranteed. "A Hong Kong writer came to us recently," Mr. Zhou told me, "and he said, 'If I stop writing, I stop eating' But on the mainland if you stop writing you can still eat." Mr. Zhou candidly added that a short- coming of this system was that with a guaranteed income a writer "might not write a good book for several years." The leader told me that writ- ers are chosen for professional stand- ing in the Association, and are thence- forth awarded salaries, by "a joint voice of writers and leaders." Once approved, a writer goes on a ladder of fourteen grades of pay. There are two categories of members: "high-standard members," who belong to the national Association and would probably be in grades ne to eight, and "less high- standard," who belong only to the lo- cal Association and earn less. Tien- tsin, I was told, had thirty-five of the former, two hundred and twenty-five of the latter. Noone could name me a Chinese writer currently at Grade One, which would draw a salary equivalent to about two hundred dol- lars a month. Liang Bin was said to be at Grade Three, earning about a hundred and sixty dollars a month; Yuan ling and Lu Li were at Grade Four, with a salary of about a hun- dred and thirty dollars. A writer at Grade Eight would earn about eighty a month. I was aware that these equivalences didn't mean much, be- cause the cost of living and the price structures in China's socialist so- ciety were so very dif- ferent from ours. The one or two rooms a family lived in could be rented for between two and six dollars a month. It was, though, clear to me that the craft of writing was relatively well rewarded in China, because I had been told that in 1980 the aver- age monthly income of Tientsiners who worked for state-owned enter- prises came to about forty dollars a month. Furthermore, besides the /lJ1 A salaries, writers receive sums for the publication of their works. Publish- ing houses decide what they will publish and what the fees will be. The national govern- ment has set a schedule of recommend- ed publishers' fees, but publishers may depart from the schedule if they wish. Yuan ling told me that a long novel of hers that was about to be published had brought her about three thousand dollars-a huge sum in China's economy. -Q. .. . ..... T HE following week, I had a long talk with Y e. We were good friends now, and it was strange to think that we had grown up as chil- dren so near to each other, unaware of each other, here in Tientsin-my home in the British Concession, and his just across the river in the Russian Concession, not far from the railroad station. Culturally, we had been light- years apart. I had lived an essentially foreign life as a missionary child. Y e had been privately tutored as a child in a wealthy Chinese home. Later, his family sent him to middle school every day in a carriage. Like many other Chinese intellectuals, he went to Japan for his higher education, intending at first to study architecture, but then, seeing the thrifty efficiency of 1 apanese farming methods, he decided he could help his country most by studying Jap- anese agricultural science. Back in China, he eventually joined the Demo- cratic League, which at first tried to find a middle ground between Chiang